Arthur C. Clarke - The Nine Billion Names of God

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Contents
Arthur C.Clarke
The Nine Billion
Names of God
From among the hundred or so stories he has written in the course of thirty
years, Arthur C. Clarke selected for this volume those he himself likes best.
The skill of their telling is beyond praise, and prefatory notes to a number
of the stories add to the interest of a thoroughly satisfying collection. One
of the stories, "The Sentinel," inspired the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"Science fiction readers are sure to agree that Mr. Clarke's best are among
the genre's best. For Arthur Clarke is not only writer and scientist, but he
is a humanist, too ... provokes his readers to think constructively about
man's future, and to be concerned for man to have one ..." -Chicago Daily News
"When you have a writer as talented as Clarke, and he is one of the finest in
the field today, there is little a reviewer can do other than list a few
personal favorites from an almost uniformly excellent collection...not to be
missed." -Hartford Courant
Harbrace Paperbound Library Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Cover design by Hal Siegel 0-1 5-665895-X
The Nine Billion Names of God
The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Contents
Introduction / ix
The Nine Billion Names of God / 3
I Remember Babylon / 12
Trouble with Time / 25
Rescue Party / 32
The Curse / 62
Summertime on Icarus / 65
Dog Star / 73
Hide and Seek / 85
Out of the Sun / 93
The Wall of Darkness / 107
No Morning After / 128
The Possessed / 135
Death and the Senator / 141
Who's There? / 164
Before Eden / 170
Superiority / 183
A Walk in the Dark / 195
The Call of the Stars / 207
The Reluctant Orchid / 211
Encounter at Dawn / 222
"If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth . . ." / 235
Patent Pending / 241
The Sentinel / 253
Transience / 264
The Star / 271
Introduction
Over the last thirty years I have written about a hundred short stories, in
such varied locales as wartime RAF camps, islands on the Great Barrier Reef,
New York hotels, Miami apartments, London suburbs, transatlantic liners, and
Cinnamon Gardens, Colombo. They have appeared in magazines ranging from
Astounding Stories to Vogue, from Galaxy to Playboy, and since 1953 have been
published in the five collections: Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow,
Tales from the "White Hart," The Other Side of the Sky, and Tales of Ten
Worlds. In addition, these stories have appeared in various combinations with
six novels in the anthologies Across the Sea of Stars, From the Ocean, From
the Stars, and Prelude to Mars. This is all very satisfying, but for some time
I have felt the need for a single volume containing the stories which I like
best.
Every author must have his favorite stories, though he would often be hard put
to give reasons for his preferences. Sometimes these may be completely
illogical—or at least un-literary. A story written at a time and place
associated with pleasant memories may be more highly rated, in retrospect,
than a much better tale provoked by unhappiness or penury —the two greatest
sponsors of art.
Whether this selection is free from such bias, I have no idea; whatever the
reasons may be, these are my favorites.
Arthur C. Clarke
New York August 1966
The Nine Billion Names of God
The Nine Billion Names of God
The title story was written, for want of anything better to do, during a rainy
weekend at the Roosevelt Hotel. Its basic arithmetic was later challenged by
J. B. S. Haldane, but I managed to save the situation by alphanumeric evasions
whose precise nature now escapes me.
"J. B. S." also remarked of this story, and "The Star" (q.v.): "You are one of
the very few living persons who has written anything original about God. You
have in fact written several mutually incompatible things. If you had stuck to
one theological hypothesis you might have been a serious public danger." I am
glad of my self-contradiction, preferring to remain a prophet with a small p.
Nevertheless, I appear to have created a durable myth: not long ago, a radio
talk on the BBC referred to the opening situation of this story as actual
fact. And now that IBM computers have entered the field of biblical
scholarship, perhaps this theme is coming a little closer to reality.
"This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was
commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been
asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I
don't wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your
—ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what
you intend to do with it?"
"Gladly," replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully
putting away the slide rule he had been using for
currency conversions. "Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine
mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we
are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output
circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures."
"I don't quite understand. . . ."
"This is a project on which we have been working for the last three
centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to
your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I
explain it."
"Naturally."
"It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall
contain all the possible names of God."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We have reason to believe," continued the lama imperturbably, "that all
such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we
have devised."
"And you have been doing this for three centuries?"
"Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to
complete the task."
"Oh," Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. "Now I see why you wanted to hire
one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?"
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he
had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
"Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief.
All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they
are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty
here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible
combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of
God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them
all."
"I see. You've been starting at AAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZ.
. . ."
"Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own.
Modyifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of
course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising
suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter
must occur more than three times in succession."
"Three? Surely you mean two."
"Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even
if you understood our language."
"I'm sure it would," said Wagner hastily. "Go on."
"Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence
Computer for this work, since once it has been programed properly it will
permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us
fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days."
Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan
streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not
man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been
patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of
meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he
must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right. . . .
"There's no doubt," replied the doctor, "that we can modify the Mark V to
print lists of this nature. I'm much more worried about the problem of
installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not
going to be easy."
"We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by
air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to
India, we will provide transport from there."
"And you want to hire two of our engineers?"
"Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy."
"I've no doubt that Personnel can manage that." Dr. Wagner scribbled a
note on his desk pad. "There are just two other points—"
Before he could finish the sentence the lama had produced a small slip of
paper.
"This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank."
"Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The second matter is so trivial
that I hesitate to mention it—but it's surprising how often the obvious gets
overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?"
"A diesel generator providing fifty kilowatts at a hundred and ten volts.
It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It's made life at
the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to
provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels."
"Of course," echoed Dr. Wagner. "I should have thought of that."
The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to
anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the
two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in
the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring
morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to
discover.
This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to
him. "Project Shangri-La," some wit back at the labs had christened it. For
weeks now the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with
gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in
all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the
next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks
had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. In another
week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure
calculations had convinced the monks that they needn't bother to go on to
words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn't know. One of his
recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the
high lama (whom they'd naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn't
look a bit like him); would suddenly announce that the project would be
extended to approximately A.D. 2060. They were quite capable of it.
George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto
the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that
made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to
embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one
thing in their favor: they might be crazy, but they weren't bluenoses. Those
frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance . . .
"Listen, George," said Chuck urgently. "I've learned something that means
trouble."
"What's wrong? Isn't the machine behaving?" That was the worst contingency
George could imagine. It might delay his return, and nothing could be more
horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem
like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home.
"No—it's nothing like that." Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which
was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. "I've just found what
all this is about."
"What d'ya mean? I thought we knew."
"Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn't know why.
It's the craziest thing—"
"Tell me something new," growled George.
"—but old Sam's just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in
every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather
excited, or at least as near as he'll ever get to it. When I told him that we
were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I'd
ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, 'Sure'— and he told me."
"Go on: I'll buy it."
"Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they
reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God's purpose will be
achieved. The human race will
have finished what it was created to do, and there won't be any point in
carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy."
"Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?"
"There's no need for that. When the list's completed, God steps in and
simply winds things up . . . bingo!"
"Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world."
Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.
"That's just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked
at me in a very queer way, like I'd been stupid in class, and said, 'It's
nothing as trivial as that.'"
George thought this over for a moment.
"That's what I call taking the Wide View," he said presently. "But what
d'you suppose we should do about it? I don't see that it makes the slightest
difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy."
"Yes—but don't you see what may happen? When the list's complete and the
Last Trump doesn't blow—or whatever it is they expect—we may get the blame.
It's our machine they've been using. I don't like the situation one little
bit."
"I see," said George slowly. "You've got a point there. But this sort of
thing's happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a
crackpot preacher who once said the world was going to end next Sunday.
Hundreds of people believed him—even sold their homes. Yet when nothing
happened, they didn't turn nasty, as you'd expect. They just decided that he'd
made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some
of them still do."
"Well, this isn't Louisiana, in case you hadn't noticed. There are just
two of us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I'll be sorry for old
Sam when his lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was
somewhere else."
"I've been wishing that for weeks. But there's nothing we can do until the
contract's finished and the transport arrives to fly us out."
"Of course," said Chuck thoughtfully, "we could always try a bit of
sabotage."
"Like hell we could! That would make things worse."
"Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its
run four days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport
calls in a week. OK—then all we need to do is to find something that needs
replacing during one of the overhaul periods—something that will hold up the
works for a couple of days. We'll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If
we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name
pops out of the register. They won't be able to catch us then."
"I don't like it," said George. "It will be the first time I ever walked
out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I'll sit tight and
take what comes."
"I still don't like it," he said, seven days later, as the tough little
mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. "And don't you think I'm
running away because I'm afraid. I'm just sorry for those poor old guys up
there, and I don't want to be around when they find what suckers they've been.
Wonder how Sam will take it?"
"It's funny," replied Chuck, "but when I said good-by I got the idea he
knew we were walking out on him—and that he didn't care because he knew the
machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After
that —well, of course, for him there just isn't any After That.
George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was
the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The
squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset:
here and there, lights gleamed like portholes in the side of an ocean liner.
Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much
longer would they share it? wondered George. Would the monks smash up the
computer in their rage
and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their
calculations all over again?
He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment.
The high lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes,
inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the
typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be saying
anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending
rainstorm of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly
silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three
months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the
wall.
"There she is!" called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. "Ain't she
beautiful!"
She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC3 lay at the end of
the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them
away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine
liqueur. George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down
the slope.
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them.
Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they
were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain
discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and
ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk,
thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather
conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of
mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not
encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
"Should be there in an hour," he called back over his shoulder to Chuck.
Then he added, in an afterthought: "Wonder if the computer's finished its run.
It was due about now."
Chuck didn't reply, so George swung round in his saddle.
He could just see Chuck's face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is
always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
New York May 1953
I Remember Babylon
The most sensible advice ever given to writers by the very sensible man Samuel
Goldwyn, was: "If you've gotta message, use Western Union." I must confess,
however, that this story does have a message; it was written, in the
pre-Telstar days, with the deliberate intent of making the U.S. public think
seriously about communications satellites.
Needless to say, the U.S. has since done so. Only a few years after
Playboy published this cautionary tale, I was watching the launch of Early
Bird by closed-circuit TV at Comsat Headquarters. And viewers bored with
Madison Avenue fare may still live in hopes; for Comsat's first chairman has
assured me that this story is required reading for his staff.
My name is Arthur C. Clarke, and I wish I had no connection with this
whole sordid business. But as the moral—repeat, moral—integrity of the United
States is involved, I must first establish my credentials. Only thus will you
understand how, with the aid of the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, I have unwittingly
triggered an avalanche that may sweep away much of Western civilization.
Back in 1945, while a radar officer in the Royal Air Force, I had the only
original idea of my life. Twelve years before the first Sputnik started
beeping, it occurred to me that an artificial satellite would be a wonderful
place for a television transmitter, since a station several thousand miles
high could broadcast to half the globe. I wrote up the idea the week after
Hiroshima, proposing a network of relay satellites twenty-two
thousand miles above the Equator; at this height, they'd take exactly one day
to complete a revolution, and so would remain fixed over the same spot on the
Earth.
The piece appeared in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World; not
expecting that celestial mechanics would be commercialized in my lifetime, I
made no attempt to patent the idea, and doubt if I could have done so anyway.
(If I'm wrong, I'd prefer not to know.) But I kept plugging it in my books,
and today the idea of communications satellites is so commonplace that no one
knows its origin.
I did make a plaintive attempt to put the record straight when approached
by the House of Representatives Committee on Astronautics and Space
Exploration; you'll find my evidence on page thirty-two of its report, The
Next Ten Years in Space. And as you'll see in a moment, my concluding words
had an irony I never appreciated at the time: "Living as I do in the Far East,
I am constantly reminded of the struggle between the Western World and the
USSR for the uncommitted millions of Asia. . . . When line-of-sight TV
transmissions become possible from satellites directly overhead, the
propaganda effect may be decisive. . . ."
I still stand by those words, but there were angles I hadn't thought
of—and which, unfortunately, other people have.
It all began during one of those official receptions which are such a
feature of social life in Eastern capitals. They're even more common in the
West, of course, but in Colombo there's little competing entertainment. At
least once a week, if you are anybody, you get an invitation to cocktails at
an embassy or legation, the British Council, the U.S. Operations Mission,
L'Alliance Franchise, or one of the countless alphabetical agencies the United
Nations has begotten.
At first, being more at home beneath the Indian Ocean than in diplomatic
circles, my partner and I were nobodies and were left alone. But after Mike
compèred Dave Brubeck's tour of Ceylon, people started to take notice of
us—still more so when he married one of the island's best-known beauties. So
now our consumption of cocktails and canapes is limited
chiefly by reluctance to abandon our comfortable sarongs for such Western
absurdities as trousers, dinner jackets, and ties.
It was the first time we'd been to the Soviet Embassy, which was throwing
a party for a group of Russian oceanographers who'd just come into port.
Beneath the inevitable paintings of Lenin and Marx, a couple of hundred guests
of all colors, religions, and languages were milling around, chatting with
friends, or single-mindedly demolishing the vodka and caviar. I'd been
separated from Mike and Elizabeth, but could see them at the other side of the
room. Mike was doing his "There was I at fifty fathoms" act to a fascinated
audience, while Elizabeth watched him quizzically—and rather more people
watched Elizabeth.
Ever since I lost an eardrum while pearl-diving on the Great Barrier Reef,
I've been at a considerable disadvantage at functions of this kind; the
surface noise is about twelve decibels too much for me to cope with. And this
is no small handicap when being introduced to people with names like
Dharmasiriwardene, Tissaveerasinghe, Goonetilleke, and Jaya-wickrema. When I'm
not raiding the buffet, therefore, I usually look for a pool of relative quiet
where there's a chance of following more than fifty per cent of any
conversation in which I may get involved. I was standing in the acoustic
shadow of a large ornamental pillar, surveying the scene in my detached or
Somerset Maugham manner, when I noticed that someone was looking at me with
that "Haven't we met before?" expression.
I'll describe him with some care, because there must be many people who
can identify him. He was in the mid-thirties, and I guessed he was American;
he had that well-scrubbed, crew-cut, man-about-Rockefeller-Center look that
used to be a hallmark until the younger Russian diplomats and technical
advisers started imitating it so successfully. He was about six feet in
height, with shrewd brown eyes and black hair, prematurely gray at the sides.
Though I was fairly certain we'd never met before, his face reminded me of
someone. It took me a couple of days to work it out: remem-
ber the late John Garfield? That's who it was, as near as makes no
difference.
When a stranger catches my eye at a party, my standard operating procedure
goes into action automatically. If he seems a pleasant-enough person but I
don't feel like introductions at the moment, I give him the Neutral Scan,
letting my eyes sweep past him without a flicker of recognition, yet without
positive unfriendliness. If he looks like a creep, he receives the Coup
d'oeil, which consists of a long, disbelieving stare followed by an unhurried
view of the back of my neck. In extreme cases, an expression of revulsion may
be switched on for a few milliseconds. The message usually gets across.
But this character seemed interesting, and I was getting bored, so I gave
him the Affable Nod. A few minutes later he drifted through the crowd, and I
aimed my good ear toward him.
"Hello," he said (yes, he was American), "my name's Gene Hartford. I'm
sure we've met somewhere."
"Quite likely," I answered, "I've spent a good deal of time in the States.
I'm Arthur Clarke."
Usually that produces a blank stare, but sometimes it doesn't. I could
almost see the IBM cards flickering behind those hard brown eyes, and was
flattered by the brevity of his access time.
"The science writer?"
"Correct."
"Well, this is fantastic." He seemed genuinely astonished. 'Now I know
where I've seen you. I was in the studio once when you were on the Dave
Garroway show."
(This lead may be worth following up, though I doubt it; and I'm sure that
"Gene Hartford" was phony—it was too smoothly synthetic.)
"So you're in TV?" I said. "What are you doing here—collecting material,
or just on vacation?"
He gave me the frank, friendly smile of a man who has plenty to hide.
"Oh, I'm keeping my eyes open. But this really is amazing;
I read your Exploration of Space when it came out back in, ah—"
"Nineteen-fifty-two; the Book-of-the-Month Club's never been quite the
same since."
All this time I had been sizing him up, and though there was something
about him I didn't like, I was unable to pin it down. In any case, I was
prepared to make substantial allowances for someone who had read my books and
was also in TV; Mike and I are always on the lookout for markets for our
underwater movies. But that, to put it mildly, was not Hartford's line of
business.
"Look," he said eagerly, "I've a big network deal cooking that will
interest you—in fact, you helped to give me the idea."
This sounded promising, and my coefficient of cupidity jumped several
points.
"I'm glad to hear it. What's the general theme?"
"I can't talk about it here, but could we meet at my hotel, around three
tomorrow?"
"Let me check my diary; yes, that's OK."
There are only two hotels in Colombo patronized by Americans, and I
guessed right the first time. He was at the Mount Lavinia, and though you may
not know it, you've seen the place where we had our private chat. Around the
middle of Bridge over the River Kwai, there's a brief scene at a military
hospital, where Jack Hawkins meets a nurse and asks her where he can find Bill
Holden. We have a soft spot for this episode, because Mike was one of the
convalescent naval officers in the background. If you look smartly you'll see
him on the extreme right, beard in full profile, signing Sam Spiegel's name to
his sixth round of bar chits. As the picture turned out, Sam could afford it.
It was here, on this diminutive plateau high above the miles of
palm-fringed beach, that Gene Hartford started to unload —and my simple hopes
of financial advantage started to evaporate. What his exact motives were, if
indeed he knew them himself, I'm still uncertain. Surprise at meeting me, and
a twisted feeling of gratitude (which I would gladly have done without)
undoubtedly played a part, and for all his air of confidence he must have been
a bitter, lonely man who desperately needed approval and friendship.
He got neither from me. I have always had a sneaking sympathy for Benedict
Arnold, as must anyone who knows the full facts of the case. But Arnold merely
betrayed his country; no one before Hartford ever tried to seduce it.
What dissolved my dream of dollars was the news that Hartford's connection
with American TV had been severed, somewhat violently, in the early fifties.
It was clear that he'd been bounced out of Madison Avenue for Party-lining,
and it was equally clear that his was one case where no grave injustice had
been done. Though he talked with a certain controlled fury of his fight
against asinine censorship, and wept for a brilliant—but unnamed—cultural
series he'd started before being kicked off the air, by this time I was
beginning to smell so many rats that my replies were distinctly guarded. Yet
as my pecuniary interest in Mr. Hartford diminished, so my personal curiosity
increased. Who was behind him? Surely not the BBC . . .
He got round to it at last, when he'd worked the self-pity out of his
system.
"I've some news that will make you sit up," he said smugly. "The American
networks are soon going to have some real competition. And it will be done
just the way you predicted; the people who sent a TV transmitter to the Moon
can put a much bigger one in orbit round the Earth."
"Good for them," I said cautiously. "I'm all in favor of healthy
competition. When's the launching date?"
"Any moment now. The first transmitter will be parked due south of New
Orleans—on the equator, of course. That puts it way out in the open Pacific;
it won't be over anyone's territory, so there'll be no political complications
on that score. Yet it will be sitting up there in the sky in full view of
everybody from Seattle to Key West. Think of it—the only TV station the whole
United States can tune in to! Yes, even
Hawaii! There won't be any way of jamming it; for the first time, there'll be
a clear channel into every American home. And J. Edgar's Boy Scouts can't do a
thing to block it."
So that's your little racket, I thought; at least you're being frank. Long
ago I learned not to argue with Marxists and Flat-Earthers, but if Hartford
was telling the truth, I wanted to pump him for all he was worth.
"Before you get too enthusiastic," I said, "there are a few points you may
have overlooked."
"Such as?"
"This will work both ways. Everyone knows that the Air Force, NASA, Bell
Labs, I. T. & T., Hughes, and a few dozen other agencies are working on the
same project. Whatever Russia does to the States in the propaganda line,
she'll get back with compound interest."
Hartford grinned mirthlessly.
"Really, Clarke!" he said. (I was glad he hadn't first-named me.) "I'm a
little disappointed. Surely you know that the United States is years behind in
pay-load capacity! And do you imagine that the old T.3 is Russia's last word?"
It was at this moment that I began to take him very seriously. He was
perfectly right. The T.3 could inject at least five times the pay load of any
American missile into that critical twenty-two-thousand-mile orbit—the only
one that would allow a satellite to remain fixed above the Earth. And by the
time the U.S. could match that performance, heaven knows where the Russians
would be. Yes, heaven certainly would know. . . .
"All right," I conceded. "But why should fifty million American homes
start switching channels just as soon as they can tune in to Moscow? I admire
the Russians, but their entertainment is worse than their politics. After the
Bolshoi, what have you? And for me, a little ballet goes a long, long way."
Once again I was treated to that peculiarly humorless smile. Hartford had
been saving up his Sunday punch, and now he let me have it.
"You were the one who brought in the Russians," he said.
"They're involved, sure—but only as contractors. The independent agency I'm
working for is hiring their services."
"That," I remarked dryly, "must be some agency."
"It is; just about the biggest. Even though the United States tries to
pretend it doesn't exist."
"Oh," I said, rather stupidly. "So that's your sponsor." I'd heard those
rumors that the USSR was going to launch satellites for the Chinese; now it
began to look as if the rumors fell far short of the truth. But how far short,
I'd still no conception.
"You are so right," continued Hartford, obviously enjoying himself, "about
Russian entertainment. After the initial novelty, the Nielson rating would
drop to zero. But not with the program I'm planning. My job is to find
material that will put everyone else out of business when it goes on the air.
You think it can't be done? Finish that drink and come up to my room. I've a
highbrow movie about ecclesiastical art that I'd like to show you."
Well, he wasn't crazy, though for a few minutes I wondered. I could think
of few titles more carefully calculated to make the viewer reach for the
channel switch than the one that flashed on the screen: ASPECTS OF
THIRTEENTH-CENTURY TANTRIC SCULPTURE.
"Don't be alarmed," Hartford chuckled, above the whirr of the projector.
"That title saves me having trouble with inquisitive Customs inspectors. It's
perfectly accurate, but we'll change it to something with a bigger box-office
appeal when the time comes."
A couple of hundred feet later, after some innocuous architectural long
shots, I saw what he meant.
You may know that there are certain temples in India covered with superbly
executed carvings of a kind that we in the West scarcely associate with
religion. To say that they are frank is a laughable understatement; they leave
nothing to the imagination—any imagination. Yet at the same time they are
genuine works of art. And so was Hartford's movie.
It had been shot, in case you're interested, at the Temple of
the Sun, Konarak. I've since looked it up; it's on the Orissa coast, about
twenty-five miles northeast of Puri. The reference books are pretty
mealymouthed; some apologize for the "obvious" impossibility of providing
illustrations, but Percy Brown's Indian Architecture minces no words. The
carvings, it says primly, are of "a shamelessly erotic character that have no
parallel in any known building." A sweeping claim, but I can believe it after
seeing that movie.
Camera work and editing were brilliant, the ancient stones coming to life
beneath the roving lens. There were breathtaking time-lapse shots as the
rising sun chased the shadows from bodies intertwined in ecstasy; sudden
startling close-ups of scenes which at first the mind refused to recognize;
soft-focus studies of stone shaped by a master's hand in all the fantasies and
aberrations of love; restless zooms and pans whose meaning eluded the eye
until they froze into patterns of timeless desire, eternal fulfillment. The
music—mostly percussion, with a thin, high thread of sound from some stringed
instrument that I could not identify—perfectly fitted the tempo of the
cutting. At one moment it would be languorously slow, like the opening bars of
Debussy's "L'Apres-midi"; then the drums would swiftly work themselves up to a
frenzied, almost unendurable climax. The art of the ancient sculptors and the
skill of the modern cameraman had combined across the centuries to create a
poem of rapture, an orgasm on celluloid which I would defy any man to watch
unmoved.
There was a long silence when the screen flooded with light and the
lascivious music ebbed into exhaustion.
"My God!" I said, when I had recovered some of my composure. "Are you
going to telecast that?"
Hartford laughed.
"Believe me," he answered, "that's nothing; it just happens to be the only
reel I can carry around safely. We're prepared to defend it any day on grounds
of genuine art, historic interest, religious tolerance—oh, we've thought of
all the angles. But it doesn't really matter; no one can stop us. For the
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ContentsArthurC.ClarkeTheNineBillionNamesofGodFromamongthehundredorsostorieshehaswritteninthecourseofthirtyyears,ArthurC.Clarkeselectedforthisvolumethosehehimselflikesbest.Theskilloftheirtellingisbeyondpraise,andprefatorynotestoanumberofthestoriesaddtotheinterestofathoroughlysatisfyingcollection.One...

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